The formation of professional communicative intercultural competence: summarising the experience and searching for new didactic solutions

The difficulties and contradictions connected with formation process of communicative cross-cultural competence of non-linguistic profile students studying a foreign language in Russian educational institutions are theoretically considered in this article. Modern organizational and methodological measures directed to improve the language training of nonlinguist students: cross-cultural partners' empathic bi-directionality formation, the transition from teaching general English to business English, and role-playing games are being developed. It is established that each of the mentioned variants of communicative cross-cultural competence improving of non-linguist students positively influences the foreign competencies formation process, introduces elements of novelty into the students and teachers standard interaction. However, their simultaneous or sequential implementation is not sufficient to achieve the level of communicative cross-cultural competence knowledge that is envisaged by the new generation Federal State Educational Standard. The educational practice and the introduction of the mentioned organizational and methodical measures testify to the existence of significant contradictions and difficulties connected primarily with the cultural, didactic and socio-psychological aspects of mastering communicative cross-cultural competence, including the use of textbooks on business English written by foreign authors. Contradictions and difficulties are mainly caused by authentic texts from textbooks, in which some negative facts of Russian business culture are presented. Students who are incapable of objective assessment of themselves and their country business culture, as a rule, tend to experience psychological discomfort when they read texts from foreign textbooks. The article provides a methodological solution to eliminate acute contradictions and significant difficulties in the communicative cross-cultural competence formation process in the given conditions of teaching English, including: creation of conditions for students to understand the usefulness of information on Russian business culture which can be found in authentic texts presented in foreign textbooks, discussion organization of such burning issues as Russian business through the eyes of foreign partners, the culture of business relations in Russia, etc. in classroom foreign-language communication practice; development and implementation into the educational training course practice, including a workshop on business English and a series of integrative lectures under the general title "Strategies and tactics of cross-cultural business cooperation", prepared on the basis of the textbook written by N.V. Baryshnikov "Fundamentals of professional cross-cultural communication".

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